Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

popularmechanics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 102 posts

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#31

Post by viraptor »

timthorn wrote: post #24
josteink wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data. The data was simply a…

The eject-button on old machines /did/ suffer the exact same problems - removing the disk whilst the activity LED was illuminated rarely ended well!

I just remembered that even hard drives at some point had similar issues. Remember to park your heads before power off!

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#32

Post by jholman »

sdoering wrote: post #15
esaym wrote: post #8

Ah, disappointing. I was expecting some giant array of them all running in unison and making beautiful "music". Sorta like the radiohead hardware hobbyist video https://youtu.be/pmfHHLfbjNQ

Why is it disappointing content, when only your subjective expectations were not met? What is it that makes this the OC's fault? Or am I not getting something here?

What would you expect the word "disappointing" to mean, other than that the speaker was disappointed, i.e. that their expectations, which are necessarily subjective, were not met? That's the exact thing the word means!

What is it about GP's comment that makes you think they assign blame?

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#33

Post by digi_owl »

dcw303 wrote: post #3

If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and CD-ROMs.

I really wish there had been a bigger push towards some kind of standardized packet writing for DVDRW (CDRW had this issue with a one use calibration track), so that they could behave more like floppies (drag and drop file transfers etc).

The media itself is fully passive, while a SD card or thumbdrive have logic sitting between the USB interface and the raw flash. Thus optical media can be "rescued" by simply getting a new drive.

And you really need to mistreat a optical disc to make it completely unreadable.

Or perhaps someone could buy the minidisc tech off Sony and resurrect magnet-optical storage?

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#34

Post by endgame »

esaym wrote: post #8

Ah, disappointing. I was expecting some giant array of them all running in unison and making beautiful "music". Sorta like the radiohead hardware hobbyist video https://youtu.be/pmfHHLfbjNQ

Well, it's only 4MB, but will this help? http://mac-guild.org/raid.html

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#35

Post by josteink »

viraptor wrote: post #31
timthorn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The eject-button on old machines /did/ suffer the exact same problems - removing the disk whilst the activity LED was illuminated rarely ended well!

I just remembered that even hard drives at some point had similar issues. Remember to park your heads before power off!

Good catch! I had completely forgotten about that one.

For those completely oblivious to this: This was actually not about getting data written to disk, but to physically protect the drive from its own mechanical construction. The "park" command would cause the harddrive to move its magnetic read and write-heads away from the internal platters, so that when it was powered down and the disks stopped spinning, the platters would not be damaged or experience needless tear and wear.

Yeah, I'm glad we no longer have to do that exercise.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#36

Post by digi_owl »

alblue wrote: post #27

Although this is a fun idea, it's just putting an SD card into a 3.5" floppy disk case and then wiring up the read/write head with contacts to make it appear like an insertion of a normal mass storage SD card. A more accurate title would be "putting an SD card in a floppy disk case"

Makes me ponder a 3.5" SD reader with a eject button though.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#37

Post by digi_owl »

kalleboo wrote: post #9
mintplant wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expected something like the 3.5mm-to-cassette adapters that exist for older cars with tape decks. http://www.amazon.com/Car-Cassette-Adapter-iPod-Sirius/dp/B0...

Or SmartMedia flash cards that actually did work in a standard 3.5" floppy drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartMedia edit: Didn't realize they even made MemoryStick and SD Card floppy adapters. So this already existed, sort of! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath

You can also get drives that can connect to a motherboard floppy port, and take SD cards.

http://www.floppyemulator.com/

Note that i think you need to use special files that are read by the drive.

I think they are meant as a life extension for older CNC machines and industrial looms.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#38

Post by userbinator »

Sanddancer wrote: post #11
AgentME wrote: post #2

Drat, I was hoping it was like a cassette tape adapter and would work in unmodified disk drives. Do floppy disks advertise their own size, or do systems assume that they can only hold 1.44mb? You might need special driver support I guess, which takes some fun away.

They advertise their size. Back in the day, there were programs that let you reformat disks with tweaked parameters -- sectors per track, interleaving, etc -- so you could get a greater capacity. Windows 95 was shipped on a disk formatted for 1680k, for example [1]. Off the shelf disks were hit or miss as far as how big you could reformat them to, with some able to handle close to two megs, and others not able to han…

This was a somewhat popular program at the time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)

It worked by combining two completely separate techniques; the first, using more tracks, is pretty self-explanatory --- a lot of floppy drives, despite officially supporting 80 tracks, could actually move the head to 81st and 82nd tracks (rarely, even higher), and since the media was in the form of a uniform magnetisable disk, that let an extra 2 tracks worth of data be accessed.

The second technique was to reduce the number of sectors per track and the gaps between them, by making each sector bigger. To ensure interoperability with different drives rotating at different speeds, there's actually quite a lot of "padding" between each sector, as well as ID/CRC data for each one. If I remember correctly, in the highest capacity mode, 2M wrote only one huge sector per track instead of over a dozen in the usual format. This is similar to how hard disks have transitioned to using 4KB sectors internally, instead of the traditional 512B.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#39

Post by rikkus »

dcw303 wrote: post #3

If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and CD-ROMs.

On Windows, they're mounted sync by default, so you can just remove them. Of course, if you do so while it's writing, you'll have a problem - though this was the same with floppies.

Windows used to require you to 'eject' but doesn't any more, which I think is due to the above. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#40

Post by zamalek »

rikkus wrote: post #39
dcw303 wrote: post #3

If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and CD-ROMs.

On Windows, they're mounted sync by default , so you can just remove them. Of course, if you do so while it's writing, you'll have a problem - though this was the same with floppies. Windows used to require you to 'eject' but doesn't any more, which I think is due to the above. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

It is only required if you enabled write-caching for removable media. As far as I know this has never been enabled by default.
Post reply on HN